Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomorodi, and Liz Gilbert

Lewis Howes:                 This is episode number 668, Unlocking Creativity And Your Personal Genius.

Welcome to The School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now, let the class begin.

Einstein said that, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

I’m pumped about this one, because I’ve had so many conversations on the podcast about creativity and how to tap into your personal creative genius. So I wanted to bring on wisdom from four incredible minds today.

Artists, filmmakers, authors, and journalists, who give some of the best tips on creative thinking that I’ve heard. So we’ve got some clips featured from the podcasts with Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomorodi, and Liz Gilbert.

I’m excited about this one! We’ll have links on the show notes to each episode, as well, so you can go listen to each full episode if you want to dive in more on one of these. But this is all about How To Unlock Creativity And Your Personal Genius.

Before we dive in, a big shout out to the Fan of the Week! This is from Matt B, who said, “Lewis just absolutely crushes it! This podcast has everything! It’s motivating and informative, his guests have outstanding knowledge, and you get to listen to real stuff that you can use to change your life right now!”

So, Matt B, thanks so much for being the Fan of the Week! Big shout out to you! We’ve got over 3,200 five star reviews now! If you want to leave a review, go head over to the podcast app and leave a review right now, for your chance to be shouted out as a Fan of the Week.

And have you guys heard about this brand, yet? It’s called Fin. Now, Fin, for me, is a game changer, because, as a busy entrepreneur, I’ve got so many high level tasks that I’m working on, that some of the other things, like scheduling flights or booking hotels or just mapping out my schedule, doing the day-to-day things, making phone calls, paying bills, remembering important dates, it can be overwhelming to try to manage just my calendar, let alone my own personal life.

And that’s why I really like fin.com/greatness. This is like the ultimate personal assistant, virtually. It’s a high quality, on demand assistant that handles the administrative aspects of life. Thousands of busy professionals have already relied on Fin to handle tasks like we talked about, or even more complex jobs like creating a website.

Make sure to check them out! Like the best assistants, Fin knows your preferences, they remember the people you interact with and integrate with in your e-mail and your calendar. They can do a lot of great things for you.

If you go to fin.com/greatness, you can try it out for free, right now! For people who listen to this podcast. All you need to do is go to fin.com/greatness to try it out for free, right now.

Without great health, everything else suffers, and that’s why I love NordicTrack. They have a series of training equipment to give you amazing workouts in the convenience of your own home. So, again, you can save time, and have more convenience by not having to travel to the gym or pay for workout classes.

They’ve got treadmills, exercise bikes, incline trainers, strength training equipment, all this that you can put right in your own home, and you can join high energy, streamed workouts any time of the day, without stepping out of the door. You can join these streamed workouts in both studios or exotic destinations around the world.

Just start your day with a run through the streets of Paris, and end with cross-training on the shores of Thailand. Or workout on the African safari, it’s pretty cool! Workouts are led by the world’s top trainers as well, to ensure you meet your fitness goals.

And, right now, they offer a special for School of Greatness listeners. You get $75 off your NordicTrack purchase, by visiting nordictrack.com/greatness and by using the code, ‘greatness’. Again, go to nordictrack.com/greatness, and use the code, ‘greatness’, during checkout, to save $75 off your purchase.

A big thank you, again, to our sponsors, Fin and NordicTrack! Without further ado, guys, let’s dive into and tap into Your Creativity and Your Personal Genius!

* * *

Chase Jarvis:                   First of all, the things that made you weird as a kid, those perspectives that you were afraid of, that actually makes you great. Going there is part of the, that’s the source that people can connect with and you being bullet-proof and all these other things that we try and be, and obviously there’s no chance of that, but we posture, and those are the things that sort of alienate and disenfranchise and create a division between you and your fans and followers and people who might love your work.

So, what made you weird and quirky, those are your biggest strengths as an artist. So, you said, there are artists for whom insecurity drives success. Those are the artists that are willing and able to capture that and go there, and then there are artists that have the insecurities and the folks that when they stand off from those things, they are unable to connect with their audience.

And I don’t mean to say that some artists have it mastered and other artists are still on that journey. I mean to say that, even within one career there are things that we are able to go there and tap into that, that weirdness that we had as a kid, or that unique perspective, and then there are other times in the same life, or the same arc, or maybe even on the same album, for a musician, where you weren’t able to really go there, and you can tell.

It has this sort of veneer to it. So, ultimately, those things are so core to creativity. There’s a designer friend of mine, named James Victore, who I have to quote. He says, “In the particular, lies the universal.”

So, what is it about your particular situation right now, that is a story that you could tell through a piece of art, through something you’re creating something that seems super, super focused and finite and very you-centric, but ultimately, those are the very thing that millions of people who have experienced that in some way, shape, or form and that allows that connection.

Lewis Howes:                 Wow! So, would you say that if you’ve achieved your success as an artist, everything you touch turns into millions or impacts people, that in order to continue doing that and being successful as an artist, and whatever success means to you, that you need to still be insecure? Or can you be completely secure in yourself?

Chase Jarvis:                   No, no one’s – and I know a lot of super, super famous people that are crazy insecure! I think there’s the belief that you’ve achieved success and success is overnight, that’s the classic ‘ten year overnight success’. Because I honestly don’t know of anybody who’s ever made ‘it’, in the classic sense, whatever ‘it’ is, but I’ll just go with the cliché ‘made it’, where there wasn’t ten years hard work underneath that.

I’ve often used the artist Macklemore, he’s a friend, Seattle guy, he was living in his parents’ basement, early in his career. He had just got out of rehab, had been making music for ten years before he was an ‘overnight success’. He and Ryan Lewis got together, made an album, three singles, and that album is a 15X platinum album as their freshman album, their first album ever.

And the belief was that, “Oh, well, that just happened.” And there’s always all kinds of hard work that’s happening underneath the surface that people don’t look, it’s sort of like a swan, right? It looks calm on top, but underneath, you’re kicking like hell.

And even that level of keeping calm, Macklemore created his next album which is very much about exploring the insecurities that he had at the Grammy’s. Winning four Grammy’s your first year, performing artist of the year, rap album of the year.

Lewis Howes:                 Being friends with everybody and being a sensation overnight.

Chase Jarvis:                   Yeah, exactly and still wanting to crawl out of your skin when you’re alone with yourself. So there’s this dichotomy I don’t think anyone’s ever mastered, and if they have I don’t know. I haven’t experienced it myself.

It’s more like waves. I mean, waves come and go and waves are different sizes and you catch some waves and you don’t catch others. I’m really interested, in this arc of my life, around exploring our shadow selves, which is that side of us that we don’t really want to look at or pay attention to.

Because it’s in there lies a lot of the answers, I think, to what we’re dealing with right now.

* * *

Casey Neistat:                 It’s not just the numbers. It’s the relationship that young people have with content that they see online, that they choose to watch, versus the content that they see on TV which is fed to them. And that is a profound idea that I didn’t understand until my show on HBO. It was the kind of thing, like – how old are you?

Lewis Howes:                 I’m thirty-two.

Casey Neistat:                 Okay, I’m thirty-four. So when we were kids we watched as much Nickelodeon and MTV as we possibly could.

Lewis Howes:                 Yeah, and TRL.

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah, before our parents yelled at us. But you have no control over that. You turn on the TV and you’re at the behest of whatever the channel is putting in front of you. And if you liked it, you kept watching, and if you hated it, you kept watching, and that was it. That was your relationship.

But when it comes to online content, I look at the way my son consumes this stuff, and it’s like, if he’s not interested, he doesn’t watch it.

Lewis Howes:                 He goes to the next video.

Casey Neistat:                 There’s a billion channels on YouTube. And the inverse of that is, if you do watch it, it’s because you genuinely want to consume that stuff.

So the relationship that the people who choose, who take their precious time to watch my stuff online, versus the people that maybe passively consumed it on TV, that relationship is so different and so huge, that it makes it very hard for someone like me to be attracted at all to something like TV.

Lewis Howes:                 Man! That’s fascinating! And, you know, I see you running around with all the big YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat influencers, and you guys are constantly doing cross promotion and that’s just building you even bigger than any TV show as well.  When you get a group of you together shooting video, no one can compete with that viewership.

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah, and I also think this is so new, this space, and it’s so undefined.

Lewis Howes:                 Still. It’s still new.

Casey Neistat:                 Oh, of course. It’s still new.

Lewis Howes:                 Not even five years ago, you know, people feel like they’re not in unless they were five years ago, but you can still jump in today.

Casey Neistat:                 It’s in it’s infancy. It’s more competitive. It’s much harder to get anywhere in this space, now, but it’s so new that, for me, what’s most interesting about any overlap with other big YouTubers or big people in the space, is that we can share our experiences and share our understanding, because it’s such an undefined space, that there’s no other way to really learn about it than by being in it.

It can’t be taught, YouTube doesn’t know; they’re building the best tools they can, but they’re just providing us the tools. It’s up to us to build the house. So, being around other YouTubers, like at VidCon for example, where we first met, is a tremendous opportunity for me to really share my own understanding, and then to learn from other people.

And that’s what’s most exciting about the collaborations that I do with other YouTubers.

Lewis Howes:                 Sure. How long was that video shoot with Nike where you went around the world? How long did that take?

Casey Neistat:                 We did that shoot, we said ten days, it was actually nine days, and then there was a huge battle on Reddit, because nobody believed that I did that in ten days. It seemed impossible to them.

Lewis Howes:                 How many countries did you go tour?

Casey Neistat:                 I don’t know the number, but it was absurd.

Lewis Howes:                 You were flying everywhere.

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah. And the reality of it, was, it was incredible, but it was much less romantic than it looked in the beginning.

Lewis Howes:                 You weren’t sleeping.

Casey Neistat:                 We went the first five days without laying horizontally. So that meant we were sitting in, you know…

Lewis Howes:                 In trains, and planes.

Casey Neistat:                 Trains, plains, coach seats in the back, piled in the middle. And these aren’t coach seats on British Airlines or something, this is inter-African airlines that are just really punishing, day in and day out and most of the locales we were in, we were in for an hour or two.

Lewis Howes:                 Just shooting and then it’s on to the next. Get the shot, go!

Casey Neistat:                 That’s exactly right.

Lewis Howes:                 Grab a bite to eat, see ya!

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah. There was no sitting on that beach. We literally got to the beach, ran through it and then jumped on a plane to leave.

Lewis Howes:                 Shut up! Wow! What’s the key to being successful on YouTube or creating content online right now? Is it having the nice, fancy camera? Is it the production value? Is it your personality?

Casey Neistat:                 Look, if I could define what it took, I think a lot more people would follow that trajectory, because it’s the greatest job in the world, that’s why I don’t know what’s right. But I can definitely tell you what it’s not. And what it’s not, is having the best gear. First of all.

Like the vlog that I posted this morning, which I posted about five hours ago and it’s really, I’m looking at my cellphone right now to figure out just to tell you how many views it’s done in the last couple of hours.

Lewis Howes:                 There’s your cellphone. It’s on the ground.

Casey Neistat:                 Is it on the ground? How did I lose my cellphone? I’ve been sitting in one spot here! Oh, there it is. But what the key is not, is the gear and I think that’s what’s so…

Lewis Howes:                 Limiting for people, when they think, “I’ve got to have the right gear, the right mic, the right whatever.

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah. If my HBO show was shot on a point and shoot that we bought at Walmart, but I mean, so much of my YouTube, one of my most watched videos on YouTube called, ‘Bike Lanes’, which is over 15 million views, that was shot on the crappiest of point and shoot cameras. So, it’s not.

It’s what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves. So, I’m just looking at my stats right here. So, my video that I posted this morning, so I posted it three hours and fifty-eight minutes ago, and it has 140,000 views.

Lewis Howes:                 On YouTube?

Casey Neistat:                 Yeah, in the last three hours.

Lewis Howes:                 That’s amazing!

Casey Neistat:                 This video primarily was shot on my cellphone, because MTV didn’t allow any cameras at the VMA’s, but they did allow cellphones. So I’m standing there being, like, “You guys realise that every cellphone has a video camera built in? How ridiculously contradictory.” All this means is that there are going to be a million bad videos posted, instead of a million… Regardless, half of that video was shot on my cellphone.

And it’s just not. It’s like, if you can do great things with a terrible camera, you can do great things with a great camera. So I really like to drive home that point because my favourite aspect of creating online is how accessible, democratic, egalitarian it is.

Me selling a TV show for a couple of million dollars to HBO, I believe that it was primarily the merits of what we made. But I also know that we had Christine Vachon as our producer, who is tremendously influential, she’s a big time producer. She’s the one who got us the meeting with Carolyn Strauss, the former head of programming at HBO.

They had a relationship, there was nepotism involved, there were big Hollywood producers and agents and facilitators involved, and your average kid, sitting in Ohio right now, in front of his computer doesn’t have that kind of access.

What he has is an internet connection, and a crappy camera from Walmart. And that should be enough. And I think, right now, because of technology, for the first time ever, that is enough.

* * *

Manoush Zomorodi:      Our country right now is facing economic disparity, racial division, environmental problems. These are not easy fixes. So, updating your feeds constantly isn’t going to solve the problem. It makes me say that, collectively, I think what we need to do is rethink how we are using technology right now, making sure that when we do pick it up, it’s not because it’s a physical reflex, but because it’s improving our lives.

Turning them back into the tools that they are meant to be, as opposed to the taskmasters, that they have really become. Because, gosh! do we have some problems to solve and boy! do we need some original thinking to solve it.

There was a survey of 1,500 CEO’s that IBM did, and they asked them, “What is the number one leadership competency that you are looking for in your executives and workers?” And it was creativity. I mean, I think that that makes sense. The robots are going to be able to all the other jobs, but they can’t be creative.

Lewis Howes:                 Critical thinking, yeah.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Precisely!

Lewis Howes:                 Wow! And so, how is your daily practice now, with this? How do you do it with two kids, on the road? I mean, I would say it probably comes in phases where you’re like, “Okay, now it’s go time,” and I call it the play-offs, where it’s like, “I’m in play-off mode right now, I’m gearing up for the play-offs, and the championship.”

So it’s like, you’re not going to have much time to relax, but how do you do this throughout the year? Do you take breaks?

Manoush Zomorodi:      I’m kinder to  myself, I think I say to myself – it used to be that I would be, like, “Just push through! Keep going! You’ve got this!” – and now I’m like, “No, you don’t got this.” If you need to say to your husband, “Dude, I need two hours off tomorrow, and I’m going to lie on the bed and stare at the wall. Seriously, that is what I want to do with my time, now.”

I mean, I think it’s the dumbest little tweaks to your behaviour that can make a difference, so, for me, I used to think of my subway ride home as my chance to respond to all the e-mails that I didn’t get to during the day. Like, “Perfect productive period!”

But then I realised I would get home with my kids and it was like, transitioning from being working, quick person, thinking, to being thoughtful, present mother. I couldn’t do it. I was kind of like, “Let’s get homework done! Come on! Come on!” instead of, “Alright, mommy, take a deep breath and say hello!”

So, now I think of the subway ride home for me as spacing out. Kind of like, “Let’s digest what happened during the day, let’s think about about it, let your brain work at it a little bit and then let’s have that moment of transition into another part of your life, where you’re not the same person at home as you are at work.”

Facebook wants you to be all the same person in all the places, and we’re not. We have different roles that we play in all of these places. And so, for me, it’s about giving myself that transition period, like a warm-up, I guess it would be, in some ways.

Lewis Howes:                 Yeah, smart. Or a stretch, cool down.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Yes, exactly, exactly, that’s right. And I find that when I do give myself that time, there’s less waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about something. You know, that four am when you just wake up thinking about a problem, and I think it’s because, for a lot of us, we don’t give ourselves time during the day to actually process what has happened in our lives.

Lewis Howes:                 So true, so true! A lot of people who listen to my show are constantly asking, “How do I find my vision?” and, “How do I find my purpose?” and, “How do I find these things?” And I always tell people, you need to go in nature, without your device, and just be.

Like, have a ‘Peaceful Warrior’ moment – I don’t know if you read the book or watched the movie, ‘Peaceful Warrior’ – and I say, “You just need to go,” and the guy sits on a car for, like, a day or whatever, and just starts dreaming.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Totally! I’m with you!

Lewis Howes:                 Like, you got to go into nature, allow your mind to relax, don’t just be responsive, like you said, to everything.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Have you heard about this new – I don’t actually think it’s new – but they call it ‘forest bathing’, in Japan?

Lewis Howes:                 It sounds amazing! What is it?

Manoush Zomorodi:      Literally going into the forest and letting it bathe you, which is sort of beautiful, right?

Lewis Howes:                 I’ve done it! But when was the last time someone did this? Like, when’s the last time someone went camping? I love having a nice bed and things like that, but I will go to the ocean, and just lie there for four or five hours and just let the sand heal my mind, you know what I mean? And just swim in the waves for thirty minutes and just goof off.

And, to me, it just feels so refreshing to just get away from something, in mother nature, and allow it to heal me.

Manoush Zomorodi:      And I think people are looking for proof and permission that they should be doing that.

Lewis Howes:                 You have the science, right? You have the data.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Exactly!

Lewis Howes:                 Tell me more about that.

Manoush Zomorodi:      So the book is actually based on an experiment that I did with my listeners in 2015. So, I had this sort of moment where I was like, “Oh, crap! I think that, actually, my gadgets are the problem.” They’ve helped me be a professional working mother, but I think they also might be destroying my potential, essentially.

Lewis Howes:                 Your soul.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Yes! Exactly! So I reached out to my audience, and I was like, “Are you guys feeling like maybe you want to rethink your habits here? Are you kind of feeling that?” And they were like, “Yes!” So within 48 hours, 20,000 people signed up to do a week experiment. Every day we did a little behaviour tweak.

Lewis Howes:                 Kind of like the Happiness Project.

Manoush Zomorodi:      Kind of like the Happiness Project, but on a community scale. And so, the idea was that every day, for one week, they woke up to a mini podcast that explained the science and some of the design behind the technology and why we feel like our attention is being hijacked from us. And then a little behaviour tweak to try.

So I had these 20,000 people who then reported back with their data, because we partnered with some apps that helped us measure how much time we were spending on our phones, how many times a day we were picking them up, and then I got all their stories back.

And first of all, it was incredibly effective. That is what we heard from people. We heard from people who finally finished their thesis, or came up with a way to solve their start-up problem idea that they were having, or solve a conflict at work, or even just really small, minor things. Like, how to help their kid make a friend, or homework isn’t working out, how are you going to do this?

* * *

Elizabeth Gilbert:           I’ve always had the great good fortune of knowing what I love, and I love writing and so my life has been really simple. That’s all I do. That’s kind of the definition of a passion, right?

Lewis Howes:                 That’s nice!

Elizabeth Gilbert:           I know! It makes your life really easy.

Lewis Howes:                 You knew what you wanted.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           I knew what I wanted, I liked it, I didn’t really like anything else.

Lewis Howes:                 You worked in magazines, right? You wrote short stories, then books, movies.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Exactly, yes. It was very clear. Here’s the path, everything else can take a number, right?  That’s always been really obvious to me, and so, it’s also been very obvious to me to go around telling people, “Just do that! That thing that you love more than anything, just do that!” It just seems the like easiest, and it seems like good advice, and even kind advice, right?

And so, after Eat, Pray, Love came out, I started professionally saying that, going on stages and telling people “Find your passion! Do your passion!” Passion! Passion! And then one day I did an event in Australia, and when I got back there was a long letter on my wall, on my Facebook wall for me.

[It was] a woman who said, “I came to your event looking for inspiration and I have to tell you, I am sitting alone in the dark in my room, and I have never felt worse about myself than I feel now, because all I’ve been doing is trying to figure out what that thing is that you’re talking about, and, I’m telling you, I don’t have one, in the way that you define it as the thing that makes you reel like your hair’s in fire, that you would sacrifice anything for.

“And it’s not for lack of looking, and it’s not for lack of people telling [me]. People like you are constantly saying to people like me that this is the answer, and I just feel like a loser and a failure and I’m interested in a lot of things, but nothing that I would die for. Nothing that I would give my whole life for. So, I know you didn’t mean to, but you just made me feel like the biggest failure and loser in the world.”

And it was such a head turning thing for me, Lewis, because I was thinking, “Well, how many people have I done that to?” And I started thinking about all the people that I know and love, and asking myself, “How many of them could truly say, as I can, that from the time they were basically six, they had no question about what they were supposed to be doing with their lives?

Lewis Howes:                 Not that many people.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Zero! Statistically, zero. Maybe a couple, but very few. And everybody else I know, including people I admire and who I go to when I’m broken down, or I want advice. And everybody else’s path has looked like a path through a carnival fun house, you know? Trick mirrors and trapdoors, and trying this and it not quite working, and trying that, and doing this.

And so, I realised, we preach this passion thing, in an almost fundamentalist way. And I’m a jack-hammer, when there’s something that I care about and want to do. But what if everyone was? What a weird and boring world that would be. And so I’ve now kind of distinguished my mind between what I call jack-hammers and what I call hummingbirds.

And the hummingbirds are people who cross pollinate the world, by just moving from field to field and pursuit to pursuit, and taking ideas from one place and bringing them to another and mixing it up. And they don’t get as much attention and credit as jack-hammers.

Because they’re not as loud as us, Lewis! Nothing louder than a jack-hammer! Like, once we get going, we sort of like, don’t shut up, you know? And hummingbirds, they’re beautiful. And so, it was just this idea, there’s other ways to be. You don’t have to be the way that I am.

Lewis Howes:                 Be put in a box, or fit into one.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Yeah, and look, if you have a passion, of course, do it. If you don’t happen to have one, don’t worry about it. Maybe there’s a gentler answer, which is, “Follow your curiosity,” which is a smaller impulse and a lighter one, and a less high stakes one than passion. And you don’t mortgage your whole house, to follow your curiosity, you just try it for a weekend.

Maybe you like it, maybe it’s something, maybe it’s not, maybe, in the end, you embroider a very complex, beautiful patchwork life for yourself. And at the end of your life, maybe you’re not at the top of the heap, but you’re able to say, “I did the most interesting thing a human being can do, which is to follow the slight pollen trail of my inquisitiveness for the entirety of my life.

“And through that, I cross pollinated the world and created a beautiful work of art with my own existence.” That’s not so bad! But it doesn’t really get a lot of credit in a really competitive, passion fetshising society.

Lewis Howes:                 I get it!

Elizabeth Gilbert:           If you have one, you’ll know it. If you have one you shouldn’t be asking that, because you’re already doing it. If you don’t have one, take the pressure of that word off you. It’s just such a pressure word, and just keep going back to the word, ‘curiosity’. Because you do have that.

And the thing about curiosity that I think is interesting, is how underestimated it is. Because, I think, a lot of the time people are missing their invitations. There are all these invitations for transformation and for creativity, they’re missing them because their eyes are on the wrong place.

So, their eyes are on the sky, looking for the clouds to part, they’re looking for Moses to come down with tablets, you know, looking for the voice of God, they’re looking for the ‘big sign’. Because they think that that’s how it comes.

And, in fact, your eyes have to be on the ground, looking for the almost invisible trail of breadcrumbs. That’s the path. And so, the breadcrumbs are all around you and people aren’t even, their focus isn’t there, it’s up in the heavens, going, “Where’s my sign?! Where’s my sign?”

And the other way that curiosity comes is that tiny little, almost, almost imperceptible tap on the shoulder that asks you if you would please turn your head an eighth of an inch and look a little closer at this thing that you’re barely interested in, just have the most mild little touch of interest.

And I feel like people are getting those touches all the time, and they’re brushing it off their shoulders, like, “Naaah! Where’s my sign?!”

Lewis Howes:                 Why are they brushing it? Because they don’t think it’s for them?

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Because they don’t think it’s significant. Because it doesn’t seem big or important enough. And as soon as that little tap comes, and if you ever bother to turn your head an eighth of an inch, and look at it more closely, in that moment, you’re like, “This isn’t a thing, this is nothing! This is so small, and so insignificant.”

But it is a thing, it’s the first clue on the scavenger hunt, it’s the first breadcrumb. And I think the foremost shape of my entire creative journey has been about being real trusting of that. You know? Like, “I don’t know why I’m interested in this. I don’t even know what this means right now, but I’m going to trust that that’s a invitation, or the beginning of an invitation.”

And then I’ll look for the next tiny little tap, and the next breadcrumb. And so, my life hasn’t been a series of thunderous epiphanies. It’s been a series of tiny whispered invitations. Every single one of them that I’ve heard, I’ve said, “Okay.”

Lewis Howes:                 “Let me check this out.”

Elizabeth Gilbert:           “Alright, let’s check this out,” and sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s not a thing. But it’s never wasted. So, I think there’s a wonderful thing I saw recently, “Don’t ask for a sign and then ignore it when it comes.” But I think people don’t even know it is one! Because it doesn’t look like the ones in the movies, or the ones in the speeches that people give.

Lewis Howes:                 Or the Bible.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Yeah, you know, it doesn’t have ‘Voice of God’, but ‘Voice of God’ is sometimes, like, “[whispering] Hey, buddy. Psst! Just two inches to your left.”

Lewis Howes:                 Yeah, just a little flutter in your heart or your stomach, just a little bit, yeah.

Elizabeth Gilbert:           Yeah, I trust that with my life. I’ve trusted my life with that feeling.

* * *

Lewis Howes:                 There you have it, my friends! It’s all about unlocking that inner, childlike creativity. How can we continue to manifest our creativity, to use it, to practice it, so that we can have a richer, more fulfilling, meaningful life, and allow it to play into our business or careers, our family life, our personal life, our relationships?

Creativity is really one of the cornerstones of fulfilment and feeling alive. That’s why I love these clips from Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomorodi, and Liz Gilbert. If you want to listen to more of those full episodes, you can go to the show notes at lewishowes.com/668. We’ll have those linked up over there, so you can just click on them and go listen to the full episode of one of those.

If you enjoyed this, share with your friends, take a screenshot and tag me on your Instagram story. I try to reply to as many people as possible over on Instagram. So, just shoot me a tag, send it out on your story, tell people where they can go listen to this as well.

And get them in The School of Greatness community! We are creating movement together. Millions of people around the world are listening and I want to continue to spread this far and wide so more people can unlock their inner greatness.

And as well, thank you to our sponsors, fin.com/greatness. You can try them out for free right now, guys, by going to fin.com/greatness. This is a game changer! High quality, on demand assistant that handles the administrative aspects of life, so you can focus on what matters most. If you’re planning an event, want to build a website, if you need someone doing market research, if you want someone booking travel, buying gifts, all that stuff, they can handle it for you.

Check it out now, try it for free, at fin.com/greatness, that’s F.I.N. dot com slash greatness.

And also a big thank you to nordictrack.com/greatness. Again, they’ve got the top exercise bikes, treadmills, incline trainers, strength training equipment. And you can join these high class, streamed workout online, any time of the day, without stepping out of the door, from some of the top trainers in the world.

So you’ve got a personal trainer, equipment in your home, you don’t have to travel any more, convenience factor to optimise your body, it’s a game changer. And School of Greatness listeners get $75 dollars off your NordicTrack purchase, by visiting nordictrack.com/greatness, again, that’s N.O.R.D.I.C.T.R.A.C.K. dot com slash greatness, and use the code, ‘greatness’, during checkout to save $75 off your purchase.

I love you guys so very much! If you haven’t left a review, yet, go to iTunes, Apple podcast, leave a review, share this with your friends, unlock your creativity and your personal genius!

And, as always, you know what time it is: It’s time to go out there and do something great!